REVI 02.01 and RIFT02.01 are copyright (c) 1994. All rights revert to author(s) upon
publication. Texts distributed by
RIF/T, e-poetry@ubvm, or the Electronic Poetry Center (Buffalo) may not be
republished for profit in any form without express consent of
author(s) and notification of the editors, but may be freely
circulated among individuals for personal use provided that this
copyright statement is included. Public archiving of complete issues
only, in electronic or print forms, is permissible provided that no
access fee is charged.

I came across Retallack's book under interesting circumstances. I was
in Los Angeles to give a salon reading at Sun & Moon Press, and I had the
chance to visit John Cage's installation "Rolywholyover A Circus" at the
Museum of Contemporary Art. The first room of the exhibition consists of a
long table set up for browsing and for playing chess, surrounded by two
large cabinets of books and papers (some of which would be changed every
day). In fact, at first I smiled knowingly and thought that the two people
sitting down playing chess were part of the installation, but as we spoke
to one another I realized that they were no more installed than I was. I
felt like I had arrived at John Cage's house only to find a note: "I've
gone to the country. Make yourself at home. Feel free to browse." The
book-browsing was a delight. One of the first books I found was
Retallack's Errata 5uite (which, apparently, had just been published). Then, during my stay in L.A., the poet/editor/critic A. L. Nielsen, with whom I was taping a radio show for KSJS, gave me a copy of Retallack's earlier book, Circumstantial Evidence. So, circumstantially, or by chance, my trip to L.A. became a way to realize that Retallack's poetry has now begun to gather in significance, strength, force, and importance. (Such has already been known of her critical intelligence for some time now.)

At once philosophical and playful, intelligent and error-prone, Joan
Retallack's Errata 5uite is a remarkable production. Bringing together the errata slip with the five lines of the musical staff, Retallack constructs a space for thinking. Such a space bears kinship to the stanza--that is, it makes a room for thinking; it also asks us to rethink fundamental questions: poetry is a space for what? From the cover art (also by Retallack) to the title (written on a five line staff) to the series of
five-line pages, Retallack's is a book which exhibits proudly an awareness
of its own constructedness. As one of Cage's favorites, Thoreau, wrote in
Walden, "shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the
carpenter?." In terms of Kandinsky's division of modern art into two
polarities--expressionist and constructionist--Retallack's work positions
itself decisively in the latter camp. Such a commitment marks a
considerable shift in her poetry from the earlier work represented in
Circumstantial Evidence (1985).

Let me present a sample (as best I can reproduce it) of a typical page
in Retallack's book (though in its layout in the book, both right and left
margins are justified, and there are a few accent marks which my lack of
computer-expertise may not allow me to reproduce):

read for for four last line misting eart aron (of) spoken rhythms untitled
add a pronoun what it is/has agitated to a strange and not (for) tensor
analytic reads as reads as follows crossing the ford where Emerson saw the
sky glad to the brink of fear ybore dislodg-ed enso semiamazia o tics of
zero sum ergo blather to rush to race to wander

If poetry, as a heuristic mode of thinking, allows chance, errors, and
stammers to figure into its arsenal of what even a compulsively eloquent
poet such as Wallace Stevens would call "sudden rightnesses," then the
reader of such poetry must learn to inhabit a reading-space which is less
rigidly thematized, less linearly insistent than the poetry of most earlier
moderns, including Stevens. If there is a recurring "about" in Retallack's
book, it is "about" processes of reading--as in the errata slip,
recurrently a reading by replacement, "for x read y" (but also more
philosophically, "why read?").

In miniature, the passage I have reproduced from Retallack's book
enacts many of the possibilities under investigation in _Errata 5uite_. It
is the reader, in the rushes and stays of path-making, who enacts these
possibilities. If we attend to our own processes in sense-making, and in
delight at the disturbance of habitual forms of sense-making, our own
phenomenology of reading becomes itself a heuristic device. Oddly, there
is an authoritative tone to the errata slip--we are ordered into certain
directions of reading and substitution. But the reproduction of the errors
themselves introduces a humor opposite (or is it apposite) to the command
voice of correction. So that, as in the carefully multiple
manuscript-poems of Emily Dickinson, the poems and the passages do not
stabilize into their singularly corrected print but remain in their
multiply noted directions. Retallack's errata suites equivocate: both the
"error" and the "correction" are given voice (or, more accurately, space
within which to be printed, and recognized). Within such a field of
multiplicity, what Marjorie Perloff in an earlier phase of her scholarship
might have called a hymn to possibility, one such hymn, but now in a new
context, is that old tune of lyrical epiphany, a pleasing trace which
haunts much experimental writing, from that of John Cage to that of Susan
Howe. In Retallack's passage, it is the Emersonian moment of the
transparent eyeball, glad to the brink of fear, a moment which (by its
familiarity) emerges from the welter of Retallack's dense textuality as a
kind of comforting narrative release. Oddly enough, rather than Emerson's
own sudden retreat from the moment of insight and self-obliteration (back
into the conventions of the forward-moving essay), since Retallack's own
writing is not premised on self-expression but is (like Cage's) already
built on self- erasure, paradoxically, Retallack's fractured langauge
allows her/us to enter more substantially and decisively into the realm of
Emerson's ecstatic experience and to dwell there by means of a language not
tied to syntactical and semantic correctness. We cross the ford into
"ybore disoldg-ed enso semiamazia o tics of/ zero sum ergo blather to rush
to race to wander." In a sense, Retallack plays Emerson against himself.
His own attention to the magical, philosophical properties of the
individual word--which Emerson finds to be a fossil holding the traces of
certain fundamental truths which we, as inspired readers (and
philologists), can decode--now is employed with the attention to the
individual word that we'd find in Stein (of Tender Buttons or the
Portraits). If the word does have the resources that Emerson claims for
it, then much of twentieth century experimental writing has been a
literalizing and an exploring of those potentials. To put it politically,
such poetry reclaims the rights of the signifier. But those rights are not
claimed on behalf of the word as a vessel of truth but on behalf of the
word itself (freed of any preconceived obligation to a "higher" truth other
than the possibilities of its own particular being).

Many of the finest sections of Errata 5uite are built from the
writings of others. Similar to Cage's process of writing through others,
Retallack's compositions are more a mode of radicalized anthologizing.
That is, she exercises more choice in her selections and builds from them
more willfully. Here is one such example:

art is a mode of prediction not found in charts & statistics (D1) poetry
and religious feeling will be the unforced flowers of life (D1) practical
socialism consists rather in a correct knowledge of the capitalist (E1) for
the sceptics the ideal was to be optimistic (F1) the methodological
preeminence that thus belongs to poetry (G1)
D1-Dewey/E1-Engels/F1-Foucault/G1-Gadamer

But what is "the methodological preeminence that thus belongs to poetry"?
Perhaps as David Antin argued in essays and interviews in the early 1970s,
the foundational activity for modernist writing is collage. Perhaps, as in
some of Retallack's work, that methodological preeminence comes from and
illuminates the acts of reading and recomposing--reading as a means to
writing (and writing as a means to reading).

I know that for readers of RIF/T it is not necessary to ask that
typically conservative, xenophobic question: "but is it really poetry?".
Nevertheless, in relation to Retallack's work in Errata 5uite, I find it
profitable to engage some of those square questions again. For example,
what do we gain by calling it "poetry"? I think that the term improves our
chances of hearing certain kinds of musical relationships among the sounds
of the words (as in Retallack's "courage to err and Guess that Mess for
read thru authors deranged/ chronologies foretasta alphabeta foreven were
earth's inner discontent/ assuaged"). And the term "poetry" seems like a
fit occasion for a perhaps vanishing mode of attentive reading, a sort of
hyper-alertness. In his provocative and seminal book, Word Perfect:
Literacy in the Computer Age (Pittsburgh University Press, 1992), Myron
Tuman (by way of George Steiner) describes the changing scene of reading:

'To much of the planet,' writes George Steiner in the essay, 'The End of
Bookishness', (1988) 'what I have called the classical act of reading, the
private ownership of space, of silence, and of books themselves, never
represented a natural or native formula.' For Steiner, changes in our use
of space and silence, brought on by changes in electronic technology, all
spell the end of a certain book culture, except perhaps as an object of
nostalgic yearning. Gone, for example, is the 'circle of silence which
enables the reader to concentrate on the text'. And for this Steiner is
not entirely sad, for he sees that we have already lost most of the
appreciation for the wondrous things contained in books. Book culture, he
speculates, may exist in the future as it once existed in a more distant
past, as the expression of a coterie, in what he calls 'houses of reading--
a Hebrew phrase--in which those passionate to learn how to read well would
find the necessary guidance, silence, and complicity of disciplined
companionship.' (10-11)

But the entire argument about the end of book culture, and its
replacement by a culture of digitalization and the VDT, often is staged
within a very limited conception of the reading processes possible within a
book culture. Many of the most productive transgressive reading/writing
deeds within the book culture have occurred within the poetry texts of the
past one hundred (post-Mallarme) years. And Retallack's own Errata 5uite,
in its celebration of "error" as a means to renewed, defamiliarized
expression and in its playfully intelligent collagist fusing of multiple
texts, creates a hyperspace within the domain of book culture. What is so
remarkable about Retallack's book is that the presumably nostalgic gesture
of constructing a mode of writing out of contact with the bookish,
scholarly errata slip leads into a fractured, playful space of intelligent,
speculative thinking. (I am also struck by the irony of my proof-reading
my own essay; Retallack's work makes me feel funny as I try to get her
cited errors "right.")

Retallack's world of playful substitutions, of crazed phrasing and
conflicting semantic intersection, stands in opposition to an expressionist
(and distinctly Emersonian) dream of reading as a transcendental moment of
pure correspondence. The latter--a romantic myth of reading--is best
represented in Wallace Stevens' poem "The House Was Quiet and the World Was
Calm":

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Stevens' dream is of a world (via reading) of pure correspondence, of such
correspondence (presumable of the reader's consciousness with the external
world) as constituting an ultimate truthfulness. Retallack's
"truthfulness" or fidelity is to a world of much greater contingency--a
world of expressive error. Or, in Charles Bernstein's terminology, a world
of dysraphism--the stitching together of mismatched parts (to produce a new
form of rhapsody). Thus, Retallack composes in what Stein calls the time
when the work still is taken to be ungainly and "ugly," a time in which
many contemporaries fail to realize that a (truly contemporary) work is
still beautiful even when and while it is jarring and odd. In fact, more
generally, I would argue that our relationship to eccentric texts enacts a
more generalizeable political/social relationship to "otherness."

But to return more directly to the specific excellence of Retallack's
work: her poetry is one of intersecting musics, where the rhetoric and
phrasing of good old Robert Frost meets a critique of mainstream
contemporary poetry's twin dullnesses--predictable scenic writing and
predictably sincere expression:

read ignomine domine flushed with sincerity's ergo sooner or later along
the horizon o creaking smiles to go to sleep to rest is history read for an
age not so much wrong as abstracht and preliminary the coastal scenic
drive to scenic points with almost all left out to know to read the blind
reed urgent moist and smooth fore rough & civil

As I read it, the scenic and the sincere profit immensely from erasure,
interruption, and discontinuity--else we read only a boring correctness, "o
creaking smiles to go to sleep." And as I re-read Retallack's book, I
found a passage from Pascal's Pensees--a passage which I was forced to
memorize over twenty years ago--bubbling up into impertinent pertinence.
Pascal claims, "L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la nature;
mais c'est un roseau pensant." Retallack's passage, and her recurrent
juxtaposition of "read" and "reed," makes me think again of Pascal's
version of man as "a thinking reed." Retallack's work too offers a
thoughtful read, verdant reed/read, as eyes close to the page we learn "to
know to read the blind reed urgent moist and smooth fore rough & civil."

Retallack's Errata 5uite provides us with a reading experience of
choices. I begin to hear in my head these kinds of transformations: "the
road not taken" becoming "he rode not talkin" becoming "the road knot
talking." But my form of word-play differs from Retallack's. Errata 5uite celebrates the play of printed exchanges (whereas my passage, and much of my own writing, indulges in puns and other oral/aural forms of
replacement). In Retallack's invigorating stew of playful and sustaining
print, we find

to read read real denied being there at all that is to cause to follow these
the choices that make us defacto human bacchae melanesia cafeteria ergot
cert to be included a error for mirror interroregnum regulaterrrata p. 8
forementioned bag-O-bugs the gardeners friends late evenings
inadverdant soar remarks to others to mak ammendes

We see the Pleiades better by looking slightly away from them; in
Retallack's book we read (not exactly in Emily Dickinson's truth told
slant) but askew; as in the erotic play of Stein's tender buttons, we touch
around and slightly off. And with each particular reading--"inadverdant
soar remarks." We, greenly, make amends, pass amendments, read through
various emendations--"to follow these/ the choices."

As the last fragment of Retallack's composition (from Wittgenstein's
Remarks on Color) asserts and/or asks: "phenomena of seeing.--For whom
does it describe them? What ignorance can this description eliminate (W2)".
Hers is an infectious world of textual play. It does not eliminate
ignorance; instead, she compounds error, and thus earns interest on the
original casual investment. Divested of the anxiety of correctness, her
suite-music (read sweet music) tolls for the (read thee). It is, then, a
phenomenon of seeing which, I imagine, we would do well to listen too.
RIFF

In Dogon mythology, the egg within which primordial events
transpired was divided into two twin placenta, each containing a pair
of twin Nommo, who were the offspring of Amma (the first personalized
being). Each twin, spiritually, was composed of both male and female
principles, though in bodily form was either male or female. In this
tradition, earth got off to a bad start: in one placenta the male Nommo,
Yurugu, became impatient for birth and forced his way out of the egg
prematurely. He tore off a piece of his placenta and with it came hurtling
down through space out of the primordial egg. The fragment of placenta
became earth, though Amma's plans for creation had been seriously
disorganized. The earth was now provided with only a predominantly male
soul, which Amma recognized as incomplete and imperfect. Eventually the
son recognized this impurity and realized he could not rule the planet
without his twin soul. He climbed back to heaven to find her but it was
already too late, Amma had handed over Yurugu's twin soul to the other half
of the placenta and she could not be found. From that time he has vainly
searched for her. Yurugu, returning to earth, began to procreate in his own
placenta, that is with his own mother. From this wretched act there came
into existence single, incomplete beings sometimes known as the
andoumboulou.

The twinning and tearing motifs we see in the Dogon cosmology
provide one of the recurring themes throughout the writings of
Nathaniel Mackey. In addition to some twenty-five "Song[s] of the
Andoumboulou," eight of which appear in _School of Udhra_, there are
other indicative passages in the "Outlantish" section _School of Udhra_:

Saw satisfaction in a bed of yeses
calling it eelpot. Steeped indignation.
Threat. Rhythmic imprint.
Wishful,
whispered, "Be my twin."
Calling it
raw, too crude a truth to admit.
Desperate.
Unrequited. Thicketed rush which
if we could we'd outrun...
Called it
caustic, luminous brew we sip
wincing, seed finally free of its
husk
albeit broken, world an erotic
inch
out of reach

The passage envisions a bonding ceremony, and a broken seed's
release--ritual activity, an unlost pact.

Djbot Baghostus's Run, the second installment of Mackey's ongoing
prose work "From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate,"
begins with a letter by the protagonist N. describing a rehearsal of
the Mystic Horn Society (N.'s band) in which the women in the band
protest against the consideration of a male rather than a female in
the group's search for a new drummer. Dressed identically, the
women arrive at the rehearsal together and, before launching into a
powerful duet, hand out cards to the men present proclaiming, 'Halve
Not, Will Travel.' N., speculating on the scene unfolding around him,
muses "...the card had said 'Halve Not.' Not 'have-' but 'halve':
meaning, one took it, to divide into two equal parts, to share equally."
N. continues, "To what extent, one wondered, did the preemptive
concert and catechism rolled into one amount to an arraignment, a
charge of inequality, a threat of succession." In this passage twinning
and tearing motifs work both separately and together. Eventually the
group finds a woman drummer named Drenette who, according to N.,
when responding to a romantic composition Penguin (a male group
member) pens for her, "changed the rhythm he suggested to
something more difficult, more complex, polyrhythmic. 'It's about
splitting yourself in two,' she said."

Parallel to the twinning and tearing metaphors run a series of
images of location and dislocation throughout Mackey's work. "From
a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate" locates itself in
African, Caribbean, Jazz and other cultures whose roots are largely
ignored in the United States. The ongoing reports on the doings on N.,
the Mystic Horn Society, and Jarred Bottle (the band's phantom
member) illuminate the music, ritual, and other communal aspects of
these people in the music and other conversations between band
members. Alternatively, there are definite moments where we read
the enormity of the pervasive dislocation of that culture within the
dominant culture.

In a chapter entitled "Limbo, Dislocation, Phantom Limb: Wilson
Harris and the Caribbean Occasion," from his _Discrepant Engagement:
Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing_, Mackey
describes the situation faced by many of those living in "third" world
countries today:

'So on this ground,/write.../on this ground/on this broken ground,'
writes Edward Kamau Brathwaite. These lines have to do with the
Caribbean condition--fragmentation, dislocation, and so forth. The
'broken ground' is the island topography itself, the separation of the
islands from one another as though they were remnants of some
larger, sundered whole. It is also the ground of other breakages and
a metaphor for such breakages--the broken, alienated labor of slave
and descendants of slaves, the ecological breakdown or depletion of
the soil due to decades of mono-crop agriculture, the break, albeit
partial, with old world homelands, old world histories, old world
continuities and 'coherencies,' the further breakage brought about by
the collision of cultures under circumstances of enmity and coercion.
These lines also have to do with writing, and if one calls to mind the
Derridean idea that the very possibility of writing signifies and is
indebted to a cosmogonic severance known as differance, one is
prepared to understand 'this broken ground' in the way that Harris
does. The Caribbean's brokenness participates in a larger-than-local
problematic, the universal human predicament Harris calls 'cosmic
frailty', an ontological estrangement or weakness the Caribbean
writer, having no historically sustained 'coherency' as insulation or
defense, is in a position to confess. The problem of large-scale
emigration from the Caribbean, for example, the fact that every year
an enormous number of West Indians leave home in search of
economic, educational, cultural, and other opportunities abroad, is
not simply a manifestation of the dependency situation peculiar to
the Caribbean but is endowed by Harris, himself an emigrant now
living in England, with suggestions of a universal condition of exile.
In Idiot Nameless's 'Manifesto of the Unborn State of Exile' in the
_Eye of the Scarecrow_ then:

The education of freedom...begins with a confession of the
need to lose the base concretion men seek to impose when they
talk of one's 'native' land (or another's) as if it were fixed
and anchored in place. In this age and time, one's native land
(and the other's) is always crumbling: crumbling within a
capacity of vision which re-discovers the process to be not
foul and destructive but actually the constructive secret of
all creation wherever one happens to be.

What Harris, Brathwaite and Mackey seek to employ here is an
across-the-globe unification on several levels. We are asked to
consider the cosmos, all the various peoples and cultures of the
world, and many other foreign territories in the way weconceptualize
our species and the way relate to the planet in order to ensure an
on-going life cycle.

Kamau Brathwaite, near the end of "Trench Town Rock" (Hambone
10), in a section called "Short History of Dis," writes "By now the Age
of Dis. Distress Dispair & Disrespect. Distrust Disrupt Distruction." His
statement reflects the results of a systematic oppression and violence
inflicted on anyone victimized by racism, colonization, xenophobia,
Christianity, and other forces which have contributed to the
dispossession of people. The forcible removal of so many Africans to
the Caribbean and the Americas was but the first disruption which
affected following generations. Plantation and other slaveries, other
racially biased atrocities have contributed to further cultural
fragmentation and disintegration of African descendants. Certainly
the type of work Mackey does is an intellectually based practice
aimed at alleviating some of this disrespect by engaging the
intensities which make up his cultural/historical and/or mythological
background. Mackey's work points out the absences and blindspots
both in the literatures to which most Americans are exposed in the
educational system and in the culture at large. At the very least his
poetic project raises questions about a poetics which has been
rendered useless by entities which have upheld an under-emphasis
on "third" world cultures and peoples. These are the organs of
literature which Don Byrd describes in his essay "Learned Ignorances
and Other Defenses" in Sulfur 11, whose function "is to choke
intelligence with a kind of irreducible fluff, which absorbs attention
in the fascination of stimulus-response psychology." N., in a passage
in Djbot Baghostus's Run, criticizes "the patness of the 'shattered
I,'" and derides the "currently fashionable notions of a nonexistent
self" which has asphyxiated so many people involved with the
studies in language and literature over the past three decades in
Europe and North America.

There are few writing poetry in English who surpass Nathaniel
Mackey's level of sophistication with language, topical inclusiveness
and lyrical musicality. At a recent reading in Woodstock, New York,
Mackey was introduced as "the Cecil Taylor of poetry," but the
opposite might also be said to be true, that Cecil Taylor could be
called the Nathaniel Mackey of music. With some exceptions, there
are few writers who have taken it upon themselves to attack,
untune, and re/turn their songs while retaining an impeccable
cohesion in their work the way both Mackey and Taylor succeed
in using the chords of their craft. In "Alphabet of Ahtt," a poem from
"Outlantish," dedicated to Taylor, a tension released is manifest

Not without hope though
how were we to take it as
they yelled out, "Nathtess's melismatic
ttah?"
Not knowing why, we looked straight
ahead, shrugged our shoulders,
popped out fingers, we could dig it,
"What's next?"

Later in the poem the song is tightened and recontextualized:

Made us wonder would it ever do
differently, all but undone to've
been so insisted on,
anagrammatic
ythm, anagrammatic myth...
Autistic.
Spat a bitter truth. Maybe misled but
if so so be it. Palimpsestic
stagger,
anagrammatic
scat

In an essay in the 1992 issue of Talisman devoted to the writings
of Nathaniel Mackey, Aldon Neilsen explicitly declares that Mackey
"...has begun the work of reading American poetic culture back
through its African past." Indeed, Mackey's work explores and
celebrates this culture's traditions and mythologies which have, over
the past four centuries or so, been forcibly removed from their
original place of standing. By and large, the ancestry Mackey
engages today normally finds itself re-located, at best, only on the
fringes of the conscience of the dominant culture which enacted this
displacement. However, Mackey's tenses, like those of Charles Olson
before him, "are never past but present and future." Again, from
School of Udhra,

Mackey's books are maps of a large region. In them, he transverses
grounds of literal and figurative forests, fields, and sands he knows
well. His work especially displays intricate knowledge of the desert--
its varieties, its mood, its resources. A literary bedouin, Mackey
invokes and channels the desert dwellers who were, for their
cleverness, the descendents of the spirits--the jinns--that inhabit the
world. Mackey has also inherited a Bedouin's expertise over his
camel--its needs and capacities, and the peculiarities and possibilities
of each animal. Above, there is an example of Mackey's movement to
stretch the boundaries of language ("Nathtess's melismatic/ttha?")
while at the same time tying it to something earthly
("anagrammatic/scat"). In another passage from _School of Udhra_, the
word play continues, as do the earthly images of bonding (twinning)
and alienation (tearing):

covered
we were and by that
touched "I-ness" to "I-ness,"
inward, wombed inducement
arced into "us-ness,"
otherness, nothingness,
Nephthys,
Nut... Inductees
into the academy of N'ahtt

Those familiar with Mackey's work already know its particular and
special place in literature of North America today. Defiant of any
simple categorization, his vision is a hybrid of living ethnopoetics and
musical and spiritual influences which are deeply rooted in a
beleaguered but surviving African continent. These cultures, which
inspired Jerome Rothenberg in the PRE-FACE of Technicians of the
Sacred to pronounce "Primitive Means Complex," are invoked and
serve as inspiration to Mackey, whose most direct literary forbearers
would be Brathwaite and Harris. In their revitalization the
geopsychic space of Caribbean literature, Harris and Brathwaite have
extensively engaged Africa's cultural diaspora. They are writers who
recognize an ancestral landscape which involves, as Brathwaite
writes in an essay called "Timehri," "...the artist and participants in a
journey into the past and hinterland which is at the same
time a movement of possession into the present and future." Above
all, Mackey has absorbed the cries we hear in jazz and tribal music.
Coltrane's and other's horns, Jamaica's Tuff Gong, and the wailings of
aboriginal tribes all find themselves as revered ingredients in
Mackey's work, growing out of the depths of rich and arid African
soil.

1993 was a busy year for Mackey's readers. In addition to the
anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz In Poetry & Prose (edited by
Mackey with Down Beat editor Art Lange; Coffee House Press, 1993.
373 pp. $17.50), new collections of his poetry (School of Udhra),
prose (Djbot Baghostus's Run) and literary history/criticism
(Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and
Experimental Writing) were published. It is notable that all of the
books, though technically from different "genres," collectively
continue to form a dense sounding of Mackey's larger project which
includes Hambone, the literary magazine he edits, "Tanganyika
Strut," his radio program, and teaching at the University of
California-Santa Cruz. In addition to its romantic and lyric qualities,
Mackey's work is an immediate encounter with an intense blending
of knowledges, mythology, poetic insight and histories from every
continent.

Borrowing a phrase which Mervyn Morris once used to describe
the spirit of Jamaican dub poet Mikey Smith, Nathaniel Mackey is "a
true revolutionary who has fought the struggle not with bullets or
guns but with his own culture, with his own livity." Mackey's prolific
labors, his conjugation of myth, mind, history, sound, nomadic text
and awareness offer an integral projection and model of what a
culturally imaginative and intellectually and devotionally informed
poetics entails. Mackey's rebel stance is subtle but runs throughout
the work, a voice which calls attention to discontent and unrest,
mobilizing an erudite, up-to-date awareness of pervasive racial and
cultural inequalities and injustices.

An acknowledgement of the type of psychic training and slavery
inflicted upon people today, an indication of their fear of a policed
state, occurs at the beginning of a piece called "APRIL IN PARIS,"
subtitled "The Creaking of the Word: After-the-Fact Lecture/Libretto
(Aunt Nancy Version)" in Djbot Baghostus's Run. Jarred Bottle, sitting at a stoplight in Los Angeles at three in the morning, thinks of a quip he'd heard before, "Revolution would never occur in a country whose
people stop for traffic lights late at night when there's no one else
around." Subsequently, sitting at the intersection, defiantly
"deferring to nonexistent traffic," Bottle constructs an exquisite ten-
plus page journey of romantic ("...so tenuous a thread could be so
binding made for a mystery only moans could address") and musical
intrigue (he swears he hears the horns of imaginary cars playing the
three chord melody line from Frank Wright's "China"). In the midst of
his trance he reconstructs part of the meeting with Aunt Nancy (a
member of the Mystic Horn Society), from which he was coming. His
work, he explained to her, "would revolve around locale and
dislocation, two terms of a continuing obsession he felt not so much
prompted as dictated by." Jarred Bottled comes out of his spell,
finally, when a policeman approaches him. The section concludes:

The cops would ask him had he been drinking, ask what was the idea
of just sitting there. He'd tell them he was a Rastafarian, that he
was waiting for the red, yellow, and green lights to come on at the
same time. "All this time," he'd explain, "I've been thinking about
Paris and China, but it was Ethiopia I was actually headed for."
The cops would have no idea what he meant.

Nods to the Rastafarians--those followers of Haile Salassie who
believe Ethiopia is Eden, and that blacks will eventually be
repatriated to Africa--are steady in both Djbot Baghostus's Run and
School of Udhra. In a later rendition of "The Creaking of the Word:
After-the-Fact Lecture/Libretto (Lambert Version)," titled "AX ME
NOW," Jarred Bottle dreams he is being interrogated in a cell in which
newsreel footage of Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia are being
projected. He is about to speak when he hears the tenor sax of the
Mystic Horn Society's Lambert emerging from a chorus in back of
him. The description of the sound Bottle hears echoes the words of
Bob Marley's dancehall hit "Small Axe" ("If you are the tall tree/we
are are the small axe, sharp and ready/ready to cut you down..."):

Any speaker worth his or her pocomaniacal salt, it seemed to go
without saying, "tore" the language or, as he had lately preferred to
put it, chopped it up. Jarred Bottle's lecture, that is, took him back
to his adopted boyhood in Jamaica. Thus the projections of Italy's
invasion of Ethiopia. One of his most vivid and strongest boyhood
recollections was the way news of it had fired people up in Kingston.
Likenings of it to the crucifixion of Christ by "the said same
Romans" rolled off almost every tongue. Lambert's low-to-the-ground
inspection of hostile terrain, his pentacostal run, like-wise insisted
on prophetic fulfillment, the eventual triumph of Ethiopia, small axe
to Mussolini's tall tree.

In "Amma Seru's Hammer's Heated Fall" (School of Udhra) is a place

There,
though if other than for reflection
none would say, wondering,
coming forth, where they'd come
from, edgewise informant, small
axe,
tall tree...

At the end of Djbot Baghostus's Run, there is another edition of
"The Creaking of the Word: After-the-Fact Lecture/Libretto (Penguin
Version)," which carries title "E PO PEN." Jarred Bottle, twinning
again, becomes Djbot Baghostus. Baghostus is literally interpreted
brother (Ba-) of a ghost (ghostus). A grasshopper beneath his pillow
speaks to him "from under it rather than on it, as if put there (eye of
Amma, Ogo's food) by a Dogon diviner":

"Tell them you're not from here. Tell them your father is a wealthy
man, that he sang with the Ink Spots before they made it big but
that nevertheless he's a very wealthy man. Tell the that's why he
named you Djbot. Spell it out for them if you have to: d as in dot,
j as in jot, b-o-t as in bottle. Tell them it relates to ink,
eponymous ink, namesake ink. Tell them you're not from here, even
that you're not really here. Tell them it relates to ink, invisible
ink. You can never make too much of it. Tell them you're a ghost."

Djbot's father, the "very wealthy man," reads metaphorically as the
African pantheon, alive as long as any Greco-Roman tradition or
myth. The "invisible ink" is an overt acknowledgement that this
tradition is generally unseen by "them," or less discriminated against
personages. The passage implies transformation, and suggests an
empowerment derived from both the location and dislocation
Bottle/Djbot has and will likely continue to experience.

In order to read this work, prepare yourself to face a sometimes
unfamiliar orientation and a matrix of references to which most
readers with Eurocentric educations are unaccustomed; step into a
self rooted in and derived from a people and culture suppressed by a
systematically white supremacist literary politic throughout recent
history. You will be impressed at the way Mackey is able to make the
poetic intellectual and the intellectual poetic, or poetry. As Will
Alexander recently said, "think of how many PhDs there are, then
look how many Lorcas..." Nathaniel Mackey is one of few who
qualifies as both. Somewhere Gertrude Stein said, "when poetry really
began it practically included everything." Mackey's writing, which
recycles such a theory of poetics, might be read as a communique to
an angel of dust, an imaginary I-nity who embodies all that we are
proverbially made of.

In Mackey's utopian, mythical city of "Zar" (which, an epigraph tells
us, is "just this side of far"), celebrated in and title of the third and
final section of School of Udhra), we read of a

militant, ritual
fist
held high, pushed
on...
and
...the guns of war.
Shot god, bitter
book turned real. There they might
look but that their gone gaze
grow there,
taken, meaning made at whose
expense, twinned or twinless...
Twinless,
torn
within

"Zar", and School of Udhra, come to an end with a poem called
"Slipped Quadrant," which offers further advices and admonitions:

Rich
tense within we called it,
would without end, seed
within a seed sown elsewhere,
somewhere
said to've been known as
Ttha.
Wrought surfaces, putative
soul, cheated heart. Shot
body borne up to be looked
at, learned from, one
heretical
moment's reprimand...
Something a
Sufi said in Andalusia.
Something
said to've been said before.
Ominous music made a mumbler's
academy,
vatic scat, to be alive
was to be warned it said...

Mackey's "seed/within a seed sown elsewhere" is a continual seed, a
transplanted seed, a seed of discontent, in favor of creating a better
society, sown into American poetics.